Book review: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
By Philippa Tracy
When my book club chose this book, I was less than enthusiastic. Towels’ 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, was recently turned into a TV series on Paramount +, starring Ewan McGregor. I have not watched it because I really did not enjoy the novel. However, I am very happy to report that I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier 2011 novel, Rules of Civility.
Set in New York of the late 1930s it oozes all the romance and glamour of Manhattan: late night rendezvous, jazz bands, gin martinis, debutantes and love affairs. There are WASPish characters with names like: Dicky Vanderwhile, Wallace Wolcott, Bitsy and Bucky. And a main character called Katey Content, her friend Eve Ross and a love interest, a mysterious and handsome banker called Tinker Grey.
Katey, originally Katya, the daughter of a Russian immigrant from Brooklyn, meets Tinker in a chance encounter in a jazz club in Greenwich Village in 1937. This chance encounter changes the trajectory of Katey’s life; in a short space of time everything changes, from her living situation and her social circle to her career. Within a year she has lost her best friend, moved from the typing pool at a law-firm to a glamorous role at a new Conde Nast magazine called Gotham, and into the upper echelons of New York society.
Early on in the book, Katey, Eve and Tinker are involved in a car crash that leaves Eve disfigured and Tinker, the driver, feeling guilty, and consequently looking after Eve in his luxurious Manhattan apartment. Meanwhile, Katey believes that Tinker really loves her. But where will it end? And who really is Tinker anyway? He appears to be a man with excessive wealth and breeding and an attachment to George Washington’s, The Rules of Civility, his handbook for living.
But like the great Jay Gatsby, Tinker Grey, is not all he initially seems. When his secrets are revealed, Katey is left to judge him in terms of that set of rules to which he aspired. But she herself may not be entirely innocent if judged by the same standards. This is a book about “encounters which in the moment had seemed so haphazard and effervescent but which with time took on some semblance of fate.” It is about big themes: how chance encounters change the shape of our lives, the choices we make and who we fall in love with.
This is a novel with a number of literary references from TS Eliot’s, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to Agatha Christie and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, as well as the eponymous Rules of Civility. It is beautifully written, engaging and an easy read, while still being layered with a number of literary themes about love, loss, ambition, chance and how the choices we make impact the rest of our lives. As Katey says, at the end of the novel, “right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallises loss.” How true!